Twelve months is more than a year particularly in Chicago. Twelve months is winter – often with a relentlessly capital W, spring, summer, and fall. It's lazy summer days to school days to skyrocketing heating bills. It’s the seasonality of work intertwined with the seasonality of life, not just in terms of changes in temperature, but in terms of expenses that ebb and flow over the course of time.

For all these reasons, discussions about capacity – whether employment or financial – must be in the context of an entire year, because we believe that timeline to be the best proxy for the practice it will take to get a job (or accumulate some assets) and sustain them over the long term. A look at the roadmap of that year for Cara would unveil the following core ingredients.